What Happens When A Good Google Goes Bad

Google is not having a good run recently. Two weeks ago, Google announced that it was integrating Google+, its brand new social network, with its Google search results, calling the new feature "Search, Plus Your World". The resulting change to Google search results has frustrated some, angered others, and prompted a new conversation about anti-competitive practices and antitrust laws in relation to Google.

Yesterday, Google updated its privacy policy and caused a similar stir. How did Google manage to become so unpopular? This situation is the culmination of Google's slow progress from innovator to accumulator. It's not new, but it's killing the quality of Google's best product.

The most relevant comparison is with AOL, the American service which dominated online access for a time in the US (though its every attempt to launch in Australia was a dismal failure). The AOL of the 90s is a universally recognised symbol for what the internet should not be, and how the web will always be better and more innovative than what one company can provide. AOL's demise came at the hands of the open web and search engines like Google, which made it easy to find content without the heavy hand of one company's portal. Now, after 13 years of growth, the Google portal looks nearly as much like AOL as it does the search engine that helped displace AOL — and that's a bad thing.

In the Beginning, There Was the Web

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart presented a talk later dubbed The Mother of All Demos (!), so named because in his demonstration, he introduced a handful of new technologies that are now central to modern technology (and to modern life). Those technologies included, for example, the mouse, video conferencing, word processing, and hypertext.

Today, you no doubt know what the mouse, video conferencing and word processing are. You may or may not know what hypertext is, but if it sounds familiar, that might be because it makes up the 'HT' in the 'HTTP' at the beginning of every web URL. In essence, hypertext is a technology that allows text on a computer to reference — or link to — other text (or resources like images, videos and so on). It's the technology that makes the World Wide Web possible, and it's the technology that makes the internet so powerful as an open platform. Any person, from anywhere on the planet, can link from one place to another, creating a web of information and ideas that flow freely, openly, and beautifully.

In 1989, that's essentially the system that "father of the web" Tim Berners-Lee proposed, and the rest you sort of know: The web is awesome. But it's not without problems.

The First Problem: It Was Hard To Find Anything

The web wasn't exactly an instant hit. It's a nice idea in theory, but before the web could be truly useful for any normal person, the user needed to have internet access and be able to actually find things to link together. For consumers of the internet, there was no easy way to discover things on the web.

That's where services like AOL came in. In the earliest days of the web, AOL aimed to be an online portal for people unfamiliar with the web (local ISPs like OzEmail took a similar approach). AOL was a portal of curated content, products, and services for paying customers. These included, at one point or another:

Email

Instant Messaging

Aggregated news

Maps

The Netscape web browser

Various search engines

Looks familiar, doesn't it?

And Then There Was Search

A couple of things changed that eventually, and inevitably, killed AOL. First, the web grew up. Slowly but surely, people started creating great web sites, apps, and other tools that were better, and more compelling, than what AOL could offer. AOL is one company, with a specific point of view, and the notion that it would be able to do everything better online is silly. That was effectively it never achieved any great success outside the US.

Second, Google (and other effective search engines) made search a realistic way of finding things on the web. New-to-the-internet users no longer needed a portal to show them what to do on the internet. They could use Google's groundbreaking search engine to find what they wanted. The open web won out.

Google's best-in-class search engine helped make that happen. That's why Google pulls in billions of dollars every year. But, like an AOL in reverse, Google started building its own portal.

Build, Acquire, Copy And Shut Down

Google's approach changed from "We can do that better!" to "We can do that, too!"

Since then, Google has built, acquired, copied and shut down more services than most web companies could ever dream of. In the early/mid-2000s, Google was building great things. [2] It brought us Gmail (2004), Google Maps (2005), Google Reader (2005), and Google Calendar (2006) — some of its best products to date. These were genuinely strong services pushing the boundaries of what a web application could do, and some of them were true originals. [3]

Around 2006, Google stopped making its most innovative products and started buying innovation instead. For example, it bought and rebranded Writely to Google Docs (2006) and GrandCentral to Google Voice (2007); Etherpad was swallowed by Google Wave (2009) and likely, eventually, incorporated into Google Docs; and Google famously purchased YouTube (2006).

More recently, Google's approach changed from "We can do that better!" to "We can do that, too!" It built Google Knol to compete with Wikipedia (launched 2008, closing this April). Not counting the unknown-in-most-of-the-world Orkut, Google Buzz was its first misguided attempt at competing with Facebook (launched 2010, shuttered 2011). That didn't work, so Google is trying again with Google+ (launched 2011).

The Google Portal

Google, like the AOL of old, is aiming to be the online portal for people unfamiliar with the web.

Google's current direction shouldn't really come as a surprise. With enough success, every company trends toward world domination. It is against years of Google philosophy. Pando Daily's Sarah Lacy points to a 2004 Playboy interview with Google co-founder Larry Page:

PLAYBOY: Portals attempt to create what they call sticky content to keep a user as long as possible.

PAGE: That's the problem. Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that's a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn't necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal's results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It's a very different model.

The promotion of Google+ throughout search results, without question, violate Page's ideal. But Google, like the AOL of old, is aiming to be the online portal for people unfamiliar with the web. Rather than point users to the best results the web can provide, Google is pointing users to its products — products that are increasingly less worthwhile. In Page's words, this "search engine doesn't necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal's results." [1]

Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.

It's best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world‘s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better.

You can make money without doing evil.

We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

If a few of those principles seem to contradict the Google you know today, you're not alone. Lots of people have noticed that Google is getting in the way of itself:

Interestingly, in September of last year, Google internet evangelist (and designer of TCP/IP) Vint Cerf argued that Facebook could be the next AOL. I'd argue that there's no significant difference between Google and Facebook in this regard, especially with the recent Google+ integration. Every day, Google pushes harder to keep users inside its ecosystem, discouraging them from venturing elsewhere whenever possible. Every day it looks more and more like the AOL of old.

Today, Google's product page lists 46 different products and services, including all of the staples of AOL's old portal.

Every Sufficiently Large Web Company Wants To Become The Internet

Google is not the only giant web company who wants to grab every piece of the internet you use. Every sufficiently large web company wants to become How You Use the Internet. Facebook does it. Microsoft does it. Yahoo does it. They build and buy and compete with one another to become your portal, and to deliver "sticky" content. [4]

For those of us who want to use really great products, this is a fantastic bummer.

No one at Google woke up from a fever dream in a cold sweat, grabbed a pen and paper, and sketched out a brilliant and inspired new idea for a web app called Google+.

Because Google is so big, it doesn't need to make great products anymore. It just needs to make a sufficiently viable product. Its user base and platform is so large that by simply launching something, Google has a competitive advantage that a new startup that actually cares about making something great could only dream of. That's why all of Google's most recent product successes have been acquisitions. Its biggest failures products have been knockoffs. [5]

It's About the Information, Stupid

To be fair, Google makes one thing clear in its guiding principles: It wants information. The more information Google has, the better it is at search, so in a sense, it has remained true to its goals. When Google pimps Google+ throughout its products, including search results, it may be more interested in the information a new Google+ user will provide than it is in making more money by keeping you within its domain.

The problem is that Google doesn't care about making a great social network. No one at Google woke up from a fever dream in a cold sweat, grabbed a pen and paper, and sketched out a brilliant and inspired new idea for a web app called Google+. They looked at Facebook and Twitter and the threat these sites pose and thought, "Shit, we need to make a competitive social network."

Unfortunately that's not how a great product is made. That doesn't mean Google+ isn't useable, or even adequate. It is, sort of, and I'm sure Google will continue to make it more palatable to people who want an alternative to Facebook or Twitter (of whom there are many). But Google+ is a calculated business decision, not an idea. (Google Hangouts, for what it's worth, offers great group video chat.)

So What?

Google does a lot of things right, and for that reason, we love a lot of Google products. Really. Love. (How can you not find at least some love in your heart for a company that's putting serious resources into driverless cars?) I've been writing about how to use Google products to make your life easier for years. On a whole, the company has changed the world for the better. But it has never been harder to take its famous "Don't be evil" motto seriously. It's not, despite the "evil" brush strokes, a moral issue.

Google is a for-profit company, and companies want to make money. I'm not saying that Google the company is doing anything unexpected, unusual, or even, necessarily, wrong. It is what it is. A lot of us are invested in Google because we like some of the things it makes, and as a result, have held it to a higher standard. Sometimes it has met our lofty expectations. Often, it won't.

Google doesn't have to continue backtracking in AOL's footsteps, though. It doesn't have to copy every other successful web site, or buy every interesting startup that comes along, gut it, and then shut it down. Google can accept that it can't dominate every aspect of the web, and it can re-focus on making products that are new and innovative rather than redundant and adequate.

Much like AOL before it, giants like Google and Facebook want to be your internet. You probably shouldn't let them.

[1] In a frustrated response to Google's search change, engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace released a Don't Be Evil bookmarklet that tweaks the functionality of Google search's new social results to provide the best social result for a search based solely on Google's own search-ranking algorithms. Essentially, they're providing the best social results based on Google's own search rankings as opposed to Google's interest in promoting their new social network. [go back]

[2] Google has always acquired products, including during the early 2000s, including the rather significant Deja (which became Google Groups) and Blogger acquisitions in 2001 and 2003, respectively. [go back]

[4] More broadly, this is what all giant and profitable corporations do. Apple does it with its ecosystem of products — it is just historically terrible at the web. [go back]

[5] I've left out a couple of Google's most recent successes, namely Google Chrome and Android, just like I've left out other failures. Google Chrome is fantastic; Android is complicated, but it clearly suffers from many of Google's quality problems. When Android does something well, it does it really well. When it does something poorly — let's just say a user who wants badly to love Android has to regularly question whether anyone at Google is actually using it. [go back]

[1] The "social" search features can be toggled off by default. Competitors to Google in social crying foul that Google has introduced an incomplete social search feature is a bit rich being that its incomplete because they are hoarding data and locking Google out.
I honestly think that if Facebook et all had not locked down their data (allowing Google to crawl it for searches) Google would have far less interest in doing social themselves. But its a commercial decision by Facebook and co, they are leveraging your data and mine to make a profit (as does Google). Google is an innovative company do the social companies really expect it to just stick to search?

[3] Having used Google wave I can see a lot of what it did being incorporated into Google+. Things like hangouts remind me of the group collaboration aspects of wave. The real time back and forth of posts and comments within your stream reminds me of Wave to. There was a great deal of things with Wave that were ahead of its time (i think anyway) and there just wasn't enough to motivate people to use it as opposed to a mish mash of other communication methods. I think as time goes on anyone who used Wave will see more and more of its worthwhile elements showing up in G+.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I was on Google Reader than they "improved it" so now I am on FeedDemon. I just started on YouTube and you get the most inappropiate suggested videos - and no clear instructions on how to stop. The categories are very strange. On Plus they try to make me integrate my mail people with my Plus Circle.
They are losing the plot.........

I hate being "that guy", but it was no surprise to see the byline on this article.

The significant difference between Google and Facebook (and AOL) is that you're free to come and go. With you data. You're not locked-in. They're trying their best to be transparent.

Maybe I'm the sucker, but to me Google are still _trying_ to do the right thing. Sure, they don't always succeed, but intentions still count. I could never say the same for Facebook. And if Google didn't do any consolidating, they'd become the next Yahoo.

The "don't be evil" tag is like a red rag to a bull. A lot of people seem to have a narrative set in their minds that they're just waiting to 'prove' to the world. The eagerness for some to see their narrative play out is getting embarassing.

I know what sort of article this gonna be - so many weak points that i could exploit to make this article another shit that hit the fan to its author by saying that Adam Pash is just another Google hater.

But take number [5] just for example. What a LOL he is branding Android as complicated. The obvious question after that statement is - what is his IQ level?

The next question is - why he doesn't care to explain why Android is 'complicated' and particularly explaining how is that Google's fault? (instead of manufacturer's or himself that is not up to general standard)

I for one, love the article just as I loved everything Google until recently when I heard that Google was not being fair and balanced in politics of all things. You can not google anything that is negative about the President but you can google all things bad that are said about the GOP. I for one want to see both sides. In their widgets you can't get Fox News, Only CNN. I for one will take my idea of fair and balanced and begin to look elsewhere for for my search engine, mail and other on line entertainment. Your article was the only thing I could find concerning Google at all, that wasn't just sickeningly uplifting.

I'll say it straight up -- most of this commenters' claim is utter nonsense. No problem whatsoever using Google to find negative comments about the US president, for instance. And Lifehacker is far from the only site to have criticised Google.

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